


Ruby Darlin'

by Sour_Idealist



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Backstory, F/F, Female-Centric, Gore, Hell, Loyalty, POV Female Character, Preseries, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 04:35:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/486753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between back when the plague was big and now, Ruby made the bargain that everyone makes: I'll pick up the razor if it'll get me off the rack.</p><p>Between back when the plague was big and now, Meg apprenticed under Alastair in hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ruby Darlin'

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, lest you did not read the tags: warnings for sustained torture and some fairly serious gore. Specifics you may want to know about include damage to eyeballs, tongues, and fingers. Also, although none of the violence is sexual in nature, there's sexual imagery, there are threats of rape, and there's a scattering of misogynistic slurs to top the whole thing off. I think you have now been fairly warned.
> 
> With that out of the way: infinite infinite infinite thanks to [Sara](http://rubikovs.tumblr.com), as usual, for the beta job and for all her encouragement.

“Hel- _lo_ , sugar," the demon who will borrow the name Meg someday purrs into the delicate shell of Ruby's ear. It's remarkable the girl has kept _her_ name this long. "Looks like you're my special project for the next chunk of eternity." She settles the point of her knife just below where her lips brush Ruby's throat, slips the edge under the skin - a delicate, tiny sliver of pain, no worse than a paper cut. An appetizer, or even just the scent of dinner streaming out of the kitchen. "Won't that be _fun_?"  
  
Ruby hisses past the leather in her mouth, which Meg has been instructed to remove before she's done. "There's so much that can be done with a mouth," Alastair frets at her, day after day, turning that razor blade he used on her between his hands. "I can't let you out of my care without a grasp on it." But that's for later, and for now, Meg can slice this scrap of stubborn witch-whore any way she likes.  
  
Meg peels the skin off her throat and slides her fingers into Ruby’s mouth from underneath, playing with her tongue with the gag still straining over her lips, just to prove a point before Meg does what she's been told.  
  
\----  
  
"You know, honeypie," Meg murmurs, setting the point of her knife in the hollow of Ruby's throat and starting to turn it - not enough to draw more than a thin pinprick of blood, just enough to remind Ruby of last time - "I can make it all be over for you. You gotta know the deal by now. How long's it been?"  
  
"Fuck you," Ruby rasps at her, and Meg just has to laugh.  
  
"There's an idea, cupcake!" she says, flicking the knife up so drops of blood fall back on Ruby's face. She slides the tip over Ruby’s skin - not cutting yet, not yet - until it rests just below the spare curve of her navel. "You know, if I were serving under anybody else, I'd try it out. But Alastair won't have it - says it's unoriginal." She snorts, tossing her hair. "Me, I say the oldest tricks in the book got there for a reason, but I'm just the apprentice." She digs the knife in until the tip pops back out in the center of Ruby's belly button, a little bit of precision Meg enjoys. "The only apprentice, right now. Plenty of room for one more."  
  
"I won't -" Ruby hisses, staring at the bright steel sticking out of her. "I - never."  
  
"That's what we all said," Meg she says (she thinks she says aloud, at least), and jerks the blade straight up.  
  
\----  
  
"Today?" Meg asks idly, knees on either side of Ruby's hips, a single strap over the back of Ruby's neck holding her face-down to the rack, while Meg carves the shape of a wing into the muscle over Ruby’s shoulder blade. "We've had kind of an influx of fresh meat lately. The master says it's probably another war." She slices a few ribbony feathers in the skin, just for the hell of it. Hah. "Or a plague, maybe? That always brings good numbers. Charlatans making a quick buck, people going all nasty cause they’re scared, throwing the sick out on their ears... selling their souls for some precious buddy’s miraculous recovery." Slice, shift, and Meg lifts bone neatly free from muscle, turns it over in her hands as Ruby screams. "Not that you'd know anything about that, honey darling."  
  
"Fuck you," Ruby spits again. "I did save her, I did -"  
  
"And witched her all the way into the throne room, I know," Meg snorts, letting the bone fall into the pit and climbing off her meat-rack onto the floor that forms under her feet. Hell holds its own up, if they focus. "Just wait until you see what I'm cooking up for you next here, babydoll." The brazier calls itself to life under her hands, a gesture from a long way back. One Ruby most likely knows - ex-witch bitch - but her head's twisted round the other way, nothing for her to see but metal and what Hell has for a sky. "But you liked the power you got out of it, huh, darling? Everyone down here is power-hungry." Tongs form out of the side of the rack, and Meg lifts a coal between the points, straddles her project again. "Sooner or later, we are, and you were when you got down here, even." Carefully, she pries the remains of Ruby's back out of her way with all the tenderness a lover might use on lingerie. "And don't start about altruism, sweet cheeks, you weren't giving her power just out of the goodness of your heart, huh?" She moves Ruby's hair aside almost as an afterthought. "She would've been your masterpiece, and you could have done it all on your own too, you know that? Too bad that plague had to mess up your plans." She kisses the back of Ruby's neck. "See, I know all about it. How much fun it is to make somebody great? I see Alastair enjoying it every - single - day." The coal she's holding in the air is dying; a glance and it flares up again. "You're our kind, Ruby-baby, and sooner or later you'll be the best of us."  
  
And with that, she slides the coal into where Ruby's shoulder used to be, forcing it through muscle and only then willing it to shape itself after the bone. It won't burn out.  
  
\----  
  
"You're wrong," Ruby pants, days afterward, and Meg, toys cool against her hands, turns to the rack and blinks. "You're wrong about me. I'm not - I'm not a torturer, I'm not a _coward_." Spittle accompanies the last, and flagstone vanishes in spit-shaped patches, letting liquid fall into the depths of the pit. Meg shakes her head.  
  
"Maybe you were, maybe you weren't," she says, and reaches for the handle of the whip. Three tails, ragged tips, but it needs a little more. If there wasn't a jar of acid on the low shelf of the cart before, there is now, with the thought. (Hell looks after its own, if you earn it.) "But down here, sweetie darling, we're all torturers sooner or later. It's just a matter of how long it takes before you fall in line."  
  
\----  
  
"You know, baby," Meg observes, curling Ruby's fingers around the squelchy remains of one of Ruby's eyes, "it's not so bad."  
  
Ruby snorts, dry and strangely genuine, which makes Meg smile. "What - Hell?"  
  
"Taking the bargain," Meg says, and squeezes a little tighter. "You know, I think with the next eye I'll stretch the nerves instead of severing them, make you know what it feels like to squash it out. How's that sound?"  
  
The noise that Ruby makes is nauseated, but all she says, panting, is "You're not helping your case."  
  
"I'm not?" Meg shatters a finger, shrugging. "You won't believe how good it feels, after all that. Let it loose, baby. Take someone apart."  
  
"No," Ruby hisses, and Meg shrugs again, snaps her wrist neatly and starts in on the other eye.  
  
\----  
  
"Why would I want to?" Ruby asks, her guts spilling bright and loose and lovely over Meg's hands, and Meg is so distracted by their shining curves that she almost has to ask - but she catches a whiff of the shame boiling out of Ruby's skin, and understands.  
  
"You want this to keep happening?" she asks, digging a little deeper - Alastair wants her to play Ruby's spine like a puppet string, send pain skyrocketing through her from the center out, and that's what Meg is going to do. "You just like being my little bitch that much, huh..." Gut, muscle, fat, rib scraping against her knuckles.  
  
"And then?" Ruby manages, jaw tight. Today she's trying not to scream; she hasn't pulled that one in a decade and a half. "I spend the rest of eternity bending over a brazier? I don't think so."  
  
"That's really all you think it is?" Meg smirks and tilts her head, drums her fingers on the rib beneath her hands. Ruby raises her eyebrows, condescending, and Meg is growling before she can begin to think: "Hell looks after its own, _bitch_." She wraps her fingers around the bone and starts to twist, yanking it out. "We may be the rejects, but if you earn your place we stick together." Twist, jerk, lever down. "And it's not going to be eternity, you little fuck, because sooner or later we're gonna win this war, and then -" Snap, crack; the rib comes loose. "Then we're going to Heaven, baby. At least the faithful ones. And then we'll get to _rule_."  
  
"So much for the meek inheriting the earth," Ruby gasps. Meg taps the rib against her companion’s strapped-down thigh, rolling her eyes.  
  
"Everyone's meek down here at least once," she says, and goes back to following her orders.  
  
\----  
  
"It's not a bad bargain, you know," Meg says, twirling a poker in between her hands like a dancer's baton. "Say yes to me, we get to train together under Alastair - and baby, I don't know how much you've listened to torturer's talk, but you couldn't be in better hands."  
  
"Better than yours?"  
  
Meg blinks. "He's the master," she says, dipping the point onto Ruby's hand. "Grip tight, bitch," she adds, putting an extra twist behind the words, and Ruby does, eyes widening in horror with the hissing burst of smoke. "Course he's better. Best in Hell, some people say - artist with a razor. And not just an artist, a famous one, the kind everybody loves. You were noble, you probably know the type."  She lets go, leaves Ruby clutching the red-hot metal, settles another poker in the coals. "If you don’t fold for me then sooner or later someone else is gonna get to play with you, and you won't get half as good a teacher next time, I can promise you that.” She straightens up. “Stick with him and me and you'll be as good as it gets before long."  
  
"Because all I've ever wanted is to be an expert torturer," Ruby chokes out, smoke still rising from her hand, and Meg laughs, giving that poker a twirl while her second one heats.  
  
"Hey, if you're gonna do it, do it well."  
  
\----  
  
"You said -" Ruby pants, Meg's fingers burning deep into her throat from the outside, "you said, before - the meek -"  
  
"The glorious dream, huh?" Meg wills her nails a little longer, digs a little harder. "Someday Lucifer gets free, and he'll ride out - we're abandoned now, but he's abandoned with us, and outcasts have each other." She rakes her fingers up. "That's the way it always goes, that's the promise. We'll get a second chance, if we do our part to get it - if we fight. We'll get the kingdom back, our old lives, everything we lost down here - everything. All we have to do is fight for him." She grabs Ruby's hair and yanks her back. "And fighting for him is the only hope we have down here, Ruby-O, you got that? If Lucifer won't save us, there's nobody who will." Pump her fingers, twist, tug at her neck, pulling nerves into the burning air. "So, you could say... picking up the knife is actually the best thing you can do for the poor bastard on the rack. You know?"  
  
"I don't -"  
  
"Don't follow? Come on, Ruby, you're smarter than that." She twists both hands at once, the same direction. "Don't tell me you haven't learned to think through pain by now, huh? Pick up the knife, you've taken the first step to making yourself a soldier. Make yourself a soldier, you can help us win the war. You win the war, all of us go to Heaven, 'cluding the ones you tortured. As long as you can make them faithful too, of course." She lifts one hand from the ruin of Ruby’s throat to stroke her jawline, feather-light. She leaves a shining smear behind. “And you won’t have any trouble with that, you persuasive little minx, huh?”  
  
Ruby grits her teeth, muscles clutching at Meg’s hand. "And you're sure."  
  
"Sure Lucifer will win? Sure that he can save us?" Meg leans in, hair falling down to brush the gory mess she's made of Ruby's face. "Baby, I've never been more sure of anything in life or death. All you've got to do is serve..." She digs her claws deep into Ruby's shoulders. "And let me tell you, I'd _hate_ not to see you with the faithful, on the day."  
  
Ruby closes her eyes, pries them back open before Meg can. "All right, bitch," she growls. "Sign me up."  
  
\-----  
  
\-----  
  
"Ruby's on the other side.” Half of Hell is carrying the rumour, but Meg still calls in half a dozen favors to get the one who told her so onto the rack.  
  
Sometime after Satan rises, the truth comes out, and Meg's vessel starts leaking from the eyes before she can begin to stop herself. Of course her little bitch was fighting for them. Of course she fucking was.  
  
\----  
  
The night before Castiel throws her in the fire, Meg pulls her hair over her face and inhales the sulfur scent of _Lucifer_ marked on her skin and whispers, "We're going to Heaven, Ruby-darlin'."  
  
\----  
  
Sam Winchester tells her he's keeping Ruby's knife, the one he stole and used to stab her, and Meg decides right then and there: when she kills Crowley and she needs another goal, she’ll work on getting Sammy under her knife.


End file.
